Page 18 - Volume 12 Number 8

about. A fellow had been watching airplanes operate at Marysville that day – must have been bored with so little traffic – and observed this King Air land and taxi in with its weird flap condition. He strolled over to ask the pilot what had happened. As they talked, the fellow walked up to the retracted right inboard flap, took the trailing edge in his hands, and freely moved it down and up on its tracks!
Whoa! When I saw that the flap could be easily moved I realized that this was not a case of a jackscrew not being driven by its cable. Instead, it must have broken entirely and we were probably wasting time trying to access the gearbox. With the bad flap segment down, the Up limit switch would no longer be contacted so the motor might now operate ... except without knowing when to stop. So here was the plan: I’d go to the cockpit, pull the CB, turn on the battery and make sure the flap handle was Up. Then I would carefully push the CB in just enough to make contact and see if the motor operated. If it did, then I would “bump” the CB in and out, in and out, until those outside yelled to tell me that the other three flap segments looked to be fully up.
All of this happened as I described. I now left the CB pulled. We rustled up some duct tape and taped the right inboard segment’s trailing edge to the fuselage to keep it from dropping down until we had enough airspeed to
blow it up. We did an uneventful flaps-up flight back to Hayward – with the owner again flying – and told our tale of woe to the shop foreman who had overseen the work that was just completed during the pre-buy.
Do you think the fact that the flap system had been overhauled that week played any role in this event? Nah, me neither!
BB-11’s Strange Rudder Boost
It was a true blessing in my life to be assigned as the first Beech factory ground and flight instructor on the 200-series of King Airs. What a learning experience! What a thrill!
BB-1 and BB-2 were the factory’s test machines. BB-1 has a very interesting story that I may relate in a future article and BB-2 eventually became a testbed aircraft for Pratt and Whitney of Canada – makers of the PT6. BB-3, 4 and 5 were U.S. Army airplanes with some secret “stuff” that prevented our Beechcraft Training Center people from having anything to do with them. BB-6 was Mrs. Beech’s airplane and a factory demonstrator. BB-7 and BB-8 had a large camera window installed in the belly and they went to the government of British Columbia, Canada, to be used for ground mapping as well as executive transportation. BB-9 was the first one sold to an actual civilian customer – Tom Watson, the Chairman of the Board of IBM at that time. I was not involved with BB-10 and am not sure of its early history. But then came BB-11. Rod Rodriquez, a wonderful gentleman, excellent pilot and an exceptional Beechcraft salesman in the Beechcraft West office in Van Nuys, California, sold this airplane to the government of Bolivia, to be added to that country’s “Air Force One” fleet.
Two Bolivian Air Force pilots, a Major and a Lieutenant Colonel, showed up at the Training Center as BB-11 was nearing its delivery date. They completed our five-day ground school before starting their flight training in the actual airplane, and I was the instructor assigned. The plane would be based in the executive capital city, La Paz, at an elevation of 13,300 feet! (The Major had grown up there and hence was very accustomed to thin air. He told me that when he did his first altitude chamber ride at Randolph Air Force Base while training with the U.S. Air Force, it was decided to agree that he was experiencing no symptoms of hypoxia after two hours in the chamber at 25,000 feet!)
As we performed the run-up before our first flight in the airplane, I found that the Rudder Boost was installed backward! When we added enough power on the left engine to trigger the system’s differential pressure switch, the right rudder jumped forward, not the correct, left one. (Good foot; good engine. Remember? How did that discrepancy get through Production Flight Test?!)
16 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
AUGUST 2018